Category: Form and Visualization – G6

Sup guys!! I drew the body part ‘feet’ for Kokopelli’s body part so how now brown cow. It’s time to search the re!! Research. To be honest I think there’s a whole ton of stuff you can do with your feet! But when it comes to conforming to the shape of the foot I think that narrows down our options significantly because the sole gets in the way. But anyway, here’s some things I thought of when it came to the feet, other than the very basic actions of walking and running.

ANATOMY OF THE FOOT

The movements the foot by itself can make:

1. Ankle Rotations

2. Toe movements:

feet in cultural dances

Cheryl had already shown some feet movements done in class with traditional Japanese ceremonies, with Japanese geisha making sweeping movements with her geta.

I also thought about marching ceremonies that have particular emphasis on the angularity of the legs in general, and suddenly recalled the most extreme version of it (HAHAHA tbh this video never fails to make me laugh):

There’s a lot of emphasis on the knees, and the soles of the foot stomping down on the ground.

I also thought of Irish tap dancing, with almost solely focuses on the foot and their shoes to generate a fast tapping and stomping rhythm (I LOVE IT ITS SO COOL HMMMMMMM):

The main parts of the foot that move would be the forefront of the sole that launches them off the ground in the dance, as well as an alternation between the forefront and back of the soles to generate the tapping noise with their shoes.

In the same vein of dancing (I’m prolly gonna be talking about dancing for quite some time) I also thought of the traditional Hawaiian hula dance which has really graceful, strong and slow footwork that involves a lot of sliding and placement, like shown in this video:

(I’ve watched it so many times) I really like what they say especially in the beginning concerning the spirit of the dance:

“And we tell our dancers, everything needs to dance. Your hair, your toenail, your eyelashes: it needs to dance.”

I think the part about braiding the leaves could also be used as a reference point for material!

And of course who could forget ballet hahahaha:

Much of the movements involve the tippy toes, like standing on them. There’s also the movement of placing the sole flat on the ground and then lifting the foot and body off the ground to stand on the toes. It’s really eye-opening to see how gruelling ballet is on a ballerina’s feet and how she casually mentions doing things like numbing the toes or taping them that seem so extreme to me when it comes to the feet. D:

If I continue to talk about the different kinds of dances I’ll probably end up with all of them though because almost all dance involves some sort of unique footwork!

From here on it’ll be about applying such motions to create sound ohno I hope it goes well ://